byarthur koestler

ON the evidence quoted in previous chapters, one can easily
understand why Polish historians - who are, after all, closest to
the sources - are in agreement that "in earlier times, the
main bulk of the Jewish population originated from the Khazar
country".1 One might even be tempted to overstate the case
by claiming - as Kutschera does - that Eastern Jewry was a
hundred per cent of Khazar origin. Such a claim might be tenable
if the ill-fated Franco-Rhenish community were the only rival in
the search for paternity. But in the later Middle Ages things
become more complicated by the rise and fall of Jewish
settlements all over the territories of the former
Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and the Balkans. Thus not only Vienna
and Prague had a considerable Jewish population, but there are no
less than five places called Judendorf, "Jew-village",
in the Carinthian Alps, and more Judenburgs and Judenstadts in
the mountains of Styria. By the end of the fifteenth century, the
Jews were expelled from both provinces, and went to Italy, Poland
and Hungary; but where did they originally come from? Certainly
not from the West. As Mieses put it in his survey of these
scattered communities:

During the high Middle Ages we thus find in the east a
chain of settlements stretching from Bavaria to Persia,
the Causcasus, Asia Minor and Byzantium. [But] westward
from Bavaria there is a gap through the whole length of
Germany.... Just how this immigration of Jews into the
Alpine regions came about we do not know, but without
doubt the three great reservoirs of Jews from late
antiquity played their part: Italy, Byzantium and
Persia.2

The missing link in this enumeration is, once again, Khazaria,
which, as we have seen earlier on, served as a receptacle and
transit-station for Jews emigrating from Byzantium and the
Caliphate. Mieses has acquired great merit in refuting the legend
of the Rhenish origin of Eastern Jewry, but he, too, knew little
of Khazar history, and was unaware of its demographic importance.
However, he may have been right in suggesting an Italian
component among the immigrants to Austria. Italy was not only
quasi-saturated with Jews since Roman times, but, like Khazaria,
also received its share of immigrants from Byzantium. So here we
might have a trickle of "genuine" Jews of Semitic
origin into Eastern Europe; yet it could not have been more than
a trickle, for there is no trace in the records of any
substantial immigration of Italian Jews into Austria, whereas
there is plenty of evidence of a reverse migration of Jews into
Italy after their expulsion from the Alpine provinces at the end
of the fifteenth century. Details like this tend to blur the
picture, and make one wish that the Jews had gone to Poland on
board the Mayflower, with all the records neatly kept. .Yet the broad outlines of the
migratory process are nevertheless discernible. The Alpine
settlements were in all likelihood westerly offshoots of the
general Khazar migration toward Poland, which was spread over
several centuries and followed several different routes - through
the Ukraine, the Slavonic regions north of Hungary, perhaps also
through the Balkans. A Rumanian legend tells of an invasion - the
date unknown - of armed Jews into that country.3

2

There is another, very curious legend relating to the history
of Austrian Jewry. It was launched by Christian chroniclers in
the Middle Ages, but was repeated in all seriousness by
historians as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century. In
pre-Christian days, so the legend goes, the Austrian provinces
were ruled by a succession of Jewish princes. The Austrian
Chronicle, compiled by a Viennese scribe in the reign of Albert
III(1350-95) contains a list of no less than twenty-two such
Jewish princes, who are said to have succeeded each other. The
list gives not only their alleged names, some of which have a
distinctly Ural-Altaian ring, but also the length of their rule
and the place where they are buried; thus: "Sennan, ruled 45
years, buried at the Stubentor in Vienna; Zippan, 43 years,
buried in Tulln"; and so on, including names like Lapton,
Ma'alon, Raptan, Rabon, Effra, Sameck, etc. After these Jews came
five pagan princes, followed by Christian rulers. The legend is
repeated, with some variations, in the Latin histories of Austria
by Henricus Gundelfingus, 1474, and by several others, the last
one being Anselmus Schram's Flores Chronicorum Austriae, 1702
(who still seems to have believed in its authenticity).4 .How could this fantastic tale
have originated? Let us listen to Mieses again: "The very
fact that such a legend could develop and stubbornly maintain
itself through several centuries, indicates that deep in the
national consciousness of ancient Austria dim memories persisted
of a Jewish presence in the lands on the upper Danube in bygone
days. Who knows whether the tidal waves emanating from the Khazar
dominions in Eastern Europe once swept into the foothills of the
Alps - which would explain the Turanian flavour of the names of
those princes. The confabulations of mediaeval chroniclers could
evoke a popular echo only if they were supported by collective
recollections, however vague."5 .As already mentioned, Mieses
is rather inclined to underestimate the Khazar contribution to
Jewish history, but even so he hit on the only plausible
hypothesis which could explain the origin of the persistent
legend. One may even venture to be a little more specific. For
more than half a century - up to AD 955 - Austria, as far west as
the river Enns, was under Hungarian domination. The Magyars had
arrived in their new country in 896, together with the
Kabar-Khazar tribes who were influential in the nation. The
Hungarians at the time were not yet converted to Christianity
(that happened only a century later, AD 1000) and the only
monotheistic religion familiar to them was Khazar Judaism. There
may have been one or more tribal chieftains among them who
practised a Judaism of sorts - we remember the Byzantine
chronicler, John Cinnamus, mentioning Jewish troops fighting in
the Hungarian army.*[See above, V, 2.] Thus there may have been
some substance to the legend - particularly if we remember that
the Hungarians were still in their savage raiding period, the
scourge of Europe. To be under their dominion was certainly a
traumatic experience which the Austrians were unlikely to forget.
It all fits rather nicely.

3

Further evidence against the supposedly Franco-Rhenish origin
of Eastern Jewry is provided by the structure of Yiddish, the
popular language of the Jewish masses, spoken by millions before
the holocaust, and still surviving among traditionalist
minorities in the Soviet Union and the United States. .Yiddish is a curious amalgam
of Hebrew, mediaeval German, Slavonic and other elements, written
in Hebrew characters. Now that it is dying out, it has become a
subject of much academic research in the United States and
Israel, but until well into the twentieth century it was
considered by Western linguists as merely an odd jargon, hardly
worth serious study. As H. Smith remarked: "Little attention
has been paid to Yiddish by scholars. Apart from a few articles
in periodicals, the first really scientific study of the language
was Mieses's Historical Grammar published in 1924. It is
significant that the latest edition of the standard historical
grammar of German, which treats German from the point of view of
its dialects, dismisses Yiddish in twelve lines."6 .At first glance the
prevalence of German loanwords in Yiddish seems to contradict our
main thesis on the origins of Eastern Jewry; we shall see
presently that the opposite is true, but the argument involves
several steps. The first is to inquire what particular kind of
regional German dialect went into the Yiddish vocabulary. Nobody
before Mieses seems to have paid serious attention to this
question; it is to his lasting merit to have done so, and to have
come up with a conclusive answer. Based on the study of the
vocabulary, phonetics and syntax of Yiddish as compared with the
main German dialects in the Middle Ages, he concludes:

No linguistic components derived from the parts of
Germany bordering on France are found in the Yiddish
language. Not a single word from the entire list of
specifically Moselle-Franconian origin compiled by J. A.
Ballas (Beitrge zur Kunntnis der Trierischen
Volkssprache, 1903, 28ff.) has found its way into
the Yiddish vocabulary. Even the more central regions of
Western Germany, around Frankfurt, have not contributed
to the Yiddish language....7 Insofar as the origins of
Yiddish are concerned, Western Germany can be written
off....8 Could it be that the generally accepted view,
according to which the German Jews once upon a time
immigrated from France across the Rhine, is misconceived?
The history of the German Jews, of Ashkenazi*[For
"Ashkenazi" see below, VIII, I] Jewry, must be
revised. The errors of history are often rectified by
linguistic research. The conventional view of the
erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from France
belongs to the category of historic errors which are
awaiting correction.9

He then quotes, among other examples of historic fallacies,
the case of the Gypsies, who were regarded as an offshoot from
Egypt, "until linguistics showed that they come from
India".10 .Having
disposed of the alleged Western origin of the Germanic element in
Yiddish, Mieses went on to show that the dominant influence in it
are the so-called "East-Middle German" dialects which
were spoken in the Alpine regions of Austria and Bavaria roughly
up to the fifteenth century. In other words, the German component
which went into the hybrid Jewish language originated in the
eastern regions of Germany, adjacent to the Slavonic belt of
Eastern Europe. .Thus the
evidence from linguistics supports the historical record in
refuting the misconception of the Franco-Rhenish origins of
Eastern Jewry. But this negative evidence does not answer the
question how an East-Middle German dialect combined with Hebrew
and Slavonic elements became the common language of that Eastern
Jewry, the majority of which we assume to have been of Khazar
origin. .In attempting to
answer this question, several factors have to be taken into
consideration. First, the evolution of Yiddish was a long and
complex process, which presumably started in the fifteenth
century or even earlier; yet it remained for a long time a spoken
language, a kind of lingua franca, and appears in print
only in the nineteenth century. Before that, it had no
established grammar, and "it was left to the individual to
introduce foreign words as he desires. There is no established
form of pronunciation or spelling.... The chaos in spelling may
be illustrated by the rules laid down by the Jüdische Volks-
Bibliothek: (1) Write as you speak, (2) write so that both
Polish and Lithuanian Jews may understand you, and (3) spell
differently words of the same sound which have a different
signification."11 .Thus
Yiddish grew, through the centuries, by a kind of untrammelled
proliferation, avidly absorbing from its social environments such
words, phrases, idiomatic expressions as best served its purpose
as a lingua franca. But the culturally and socially
dominant element in the environment of mediaeval Poland were the
Germans. They alone, among the immigrant populations, were
economically and intellectually more influential than the Jews.
We have seen that from the early days of the Piast dynasty, and
particularly under Casimir the Great, everything was done to
attract immigrants to colonize the land and build
"modern" cities. Casimir was said to have "found a
country of wood and left a country of stone". But these new
cities of stone, such as Krakau (Cracow) or Lemberg (Lwow) were
built and ruled by German immigrants, living under the so-called
Magdeburg law, i.e., enjoying a high degree of municipal
self-government. Altogether not less than four million Germans
are said to have immigrated into Poland,12 providing it with an
urban middleclass that it had not possessed before. As Poliak has
put it, comparing the German to the Khazar immigration into
Poland: "the rulers of the country imported these masses of
much-needed enterprising foreigners, and facilitated their
settling down according to the way of life they had been used to
in their countries of origin: the German town and the Jewish shtetl".
(However, this tidy separation became blurred when later Jewish
arrivals from the West also settled in the towns and formed urban
ghettoes.) .Not only the
educated bourgeoisie, but the clergy too, was
predominantly German - a natural consequence of Poland opting for
Roman Catholicism and turning toward Western civilization, just
as the Russian clergy after Vladimir's conversion to Greek
orthodoxy was predominantly Byzantine. Secular culture followed
along the same lines, in the footsteps of the older Western
neighbour. The first Polish university was founded in 1364 in
Cracow, then a predominantly German city.*[One of its students in
the next century was Nicolaus Copernicus or Mikolaj Koppernigk
whom both Polish and German patriots later claimed as their
national.] As Kutschera, the Austrian, has put it, rather smugly:

The German colonists were at first regarded by the people
with suspicion and distrust; yet they succeeded in
gaining an increasingly firm foothold, and even in
introducing the German educational system. The Poles
learnt to appreciate the advantages of the higher culture
introduced by the Germans and to imitate their foreign
ways. The Polish aristocracy, too, grew fond of German
customs and found beauty and pleasure in whatever came
from Germany.13

Not exactly modest, but essentially true. One remembers the
high esteem for German Kultur among nineteenth-century
Russian intellectuals. .It
is easy to see why Khazar immigrants pouring into mediaeval
Poland had to learn German if they wanted to get on. Those who
had close dealings with the native populace no doubt also had to
learn some pidgin Polish (or Lithuanian, or Ukrainian or
Slovene); German, however, was a prime necessity in any contact
with the towns. But there was also the synagogue and the study of
the Hebrew thorah. One can visualize a shtetl craftsman,
a cobbler perhaps, or a timber merchant, speaking broken German
to his clients, broken Polish to the serfs on the estate next
door; and at home mixing the most expressive bits of both with
Hebrew into a kind of intimate private language. How this
hotchpotch became communalized and standardized to the extent to
which it did, is any linguist's guess; but at least one can
discern some further factors which facilitated the process. .Among the later immigrants to
Poland there were also, as we have seen, a certain number of
"real" Jews from the Alpine countries, Bohemia and
eastern Germany. Even if their number was relatively small, these
German-speaking Jews were superior in culture and learning to the
Khazars, just as the German Gentiles were culturally superior to
the Poles. And just as the Catholic clergy was German, so the
Jewish rabbis from the West were a powerful factor in the
Germanization of the Khazars, whose Judaism was fervent but
primitive. To quote Poliak again:

Those German Jews who reached the kingdom of
Poland-Lithuania had an enormous influence on their
brethren from the east. The reason why the [Khazar] Jews
were so strongly attracted to them was that they admired
their religious learning and their efficiency in doing
business with the predominantly German cities.... The
language spoken at the Heder, the school for
religious teaching, and at the house of the Ghevir
[notable, rich man] would influence the language of the
whole community.14

A rabbinical tract from seventeenth-century Poland contains
the pious wish: "May God will that the country be filled
with wisdom and that all Jews speak German."15.Characteristically, the only
sector among the Khazarian Jews in Poland which resisted both the
spiritual and worldly temptations offered by the German language
were the Karaites, who rejected both rabbinical learning and
material enrichment. Thus they never took to Yiddish. According
to the first all-Russian census in 1897, there were 12894 Karaite
Jews living in the Tsarist Empire (which, of course, included
Poland). Of these 9666 gave Turkish as their mother tongue (i.e.,
presumably their original Khazar dialect), 2632 spoke Russian,
and only 383 spoke Yiddish. .The
Karaite sect, however, represents the exception rather than the
rule. In general, immigrant populations settling in a new country
tend to shed their original language within two or three
generations and adopt the language of their new country.*[This
does not, of course, apply to conquerors and colonizers, who
impose their own language on the natives.] The American
grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe never learn to
speak Polish or Ukrainian, and find the jabber-wocky of their
grandparents rather comic. It is difficult to see how historians
could ignore the evidence for the Khazar migration into Poland on
the grounds that more than half a millennium later they speak a
different language. .Incidentally,
the descendants of the biblical Tribes are the classic example of
linguistic adaptability. First they spoke Hebrew; in the
Babylonian exile, Chaldean; at the time of Jesus, Aramaic; in
Alexandria, Greek; in Spain, Arabic, but later Ladino - a
Spanish-Hebrew mixture, written in Hebrew characters, the
Sephardi equivalent of Yiddish; and so it goes on. They preserved
their religious identity, but changed languages at their
convenience. The Khazars were not descended from the Tribes, but,
as we have seen, they shared a certain cosmopolitanism and other
social characteristics with their co-religionists.

4

Poliak has proposed an additional hypothesis concerning the
early origins of Yiddish, which deserves to be mentioned, though
it is rather problematical. He thinks that the "shape of
early Yiddish emerged in the Gothic regions of the Khazar Crimea.
In those regions the conditions of life were bound to bring about
a combination of Germanic and Hebrew elements hundreds of years
before the foundation of the settlements in the Kingdoms of
Poland and Lithuania."16 .Poliak
quotes as indirect evidence a certain Joseph Barbaro of Venice,
who lived in Tana (an Italian merchant colony on the Don estuary)
from 1436 to 1452, and who wrote that his German servant could
converse with a Goth from the Crimea just as a Florentine could
understand the language of an Italian from Genoa. As a matter of
fact, the Gothic language survived in the Crimea (and apparently
nowhere else) at least to the middle of the sixteenth century. At
that time the Habsburg ambassador in Constantinople, Ghiselin de
Busbeck, met people from the Crimea, and made a list of words
from the Gothic that they spoke. (This Busbeck must have been a
remarkable man, for it was he who first introduced the lilac and
tulip from the Levant to Europe.) Poliak considers this
vocabulary to be close to the Middle High German elements found
in Yiddish. He thinks the Crimean Goths kept contact with other
Germanic tribes and that their language was influenced by them.
Whatever one may think of it, it is a hypothesis worth the
linguist's attention.

5

"In a sense," wrote Cecil Roth, "the Jewish
dark ages may be said to begin with the Renaissance."17 .Earlier on, there had been
massacres and other forms of persecution during the crusades, the
Black Death, and under other pretexts; but these had been lawless
outbreaks of massviolence, actively opposed or passively
tolerated by the authorities. From the beginnings of the
Counter-Reformation, however, the Jews were legally degraded to
not-quite-human status, in many respects comparable to the
Untouchables in the Hindu caste system. ."The few communities
suffered to remain in Western Europe - i.e., in Italy, Germany,
and the papal possessions in southern France - were subjected at
last to all the restrictions which earlier ages had usually
allowed to remain an ideal"18 - i.e., which had existed on
ecclesiastical and other decrees, but had remained on paper (as,
for instance, in Hungary, see above, V, 2). Now, however, these
"ideal" ordinances were ruthlessly enforced:
residential segregation, sexual apartheid, exclusion from all
respected positions and occupations; wearing of distinctive
clothes: yellow badge and conical headgear. In 1555 Pope Paul IV
in his bull cum nimis absurdum insisted on the strict
and consistent enforcement of earlier edicts, confining Jews to
closed ghettoes. A year later the Jews of Rome were forcibly
transferred. All Catholic countries, where Jews still enjoyed
relative freedom of movement, had to follow the example. .In Poland, the honeymoon
period inaugurated by Casimir the Great had lasted longer than
elsewhere, but by the end of the sixteenth century it had run its
course. The Jewish communities, now confined to shtetl
and ghetto, became overcrowded, and the refugees from the Cossack
massacres in the Ukrainian villages under Chmelnicky (see above,
V, 5) led to a rapid deterioration of the housing situation and
economic conditions. The result was a new wave of massive
emigration into Hungary, Bohemia, `Rumania and Germany, where the
Jews who had all but vanished with the Black Death were still
thinly spread. .Thus the
great trek to the West was resumed. It was to continue through
nearly three centuries until the Second World War, and became the
principal source of the existing Jewish communities in Europe,
the United States and Israel. When its rate of flow slackened,
the pogroms of the nineteenth century provided a new impetus.
"The second Western movement," writes Roth (dating the
first from the destruction of Jerusalem), "which continued
into the twentieth century, may be said to begin with the deadly
Chmelnicky massacres of 1648-49 in Poland."19

6

The evidence quoted in previous chapters adds up to a strong
case in favour of those modern historians - whether Austrian,
Israeli or Polish who, independently from each other, have argued
that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of
Caucasian origin. The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not
flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east
and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly
direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland and
thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented
mass-settlement in Poland came into beng, there were simply not
enough Jews around in the west to account for it; while in the
east a whole nation was on the move to new frontiers. .It would of course be foolish
to deny that Jews of different origin also contributed to the
existing Jewish world-community. The numerical ratio of the
Khazar to the Semitic and other contributions is impossible to
establish. But the cumulative evidence makes one inclined to
agree with the concensus of Polish historians that "in
earlier times the main bulk originated from the Khazar
country"; and that, accordingly, the Khazar contribution to
the genetic make-up of the Jews must be substantial, and in all
likelihood dominant.